"infinite wants" vs. decreasing marginal propensity to consume

["Gregoire de Nowell (ci-devant)" <GN842@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I received an off-line communication and I'm not sure whether it
will also be posted to pkt or whether the author desires
anonymity.  So I will summarize the argument I hope accurately.

1.  A decreasing marginal propensity to consume never reaches
zero.  Therefore under such a regimen every additional dollar
results in *some* increased consumption in addition to
a marginally increasing savings rate.

2.  The sum of the MPC and the savings rate =1 and the savings
rate is just "deferred consumption."  So it is an error to say
that Keynes does not believe in "infinite wants" in the same
manner, for example, as Hobson (and many others) have
posited.

My comments:

The "paradox of thrift" is that savings TODAY is consumption
foregon TODAY which decreases income TODAY and therefore
decreases net aggregate income and as a corollary the
potential for savings.  To think of it as deferred
consumption is at the aggregate level an error (if
I understand my Keynes, which I'm sure many may care
to dispute).  Individuals may think of it as deferred
consumption, but at the aggregate level it is shrunken
income.

Moreover, if my "wants" were "infinite" I would in fact
have an MPC of unity, and spend
everything.  If everyone did the same we would have
a zero personal savings rate and flat out consumption.
But we could still generate investment through the
endogenous process described at length by others.  But
in any case my interpretation is that if my wants
were truely "infinite" they would have no marginally
decrasing propensity.

There is, furthermore, a kind of Zeno's paradox involved
in the argument that we are always consuming more as
income increases because we are continually decreasing
the MPC towards zero without ever getting there.  At some
point we reach fractional values where it might as well
be zero, for example, whent he MPC reaches a fraction
of 1%.

It may be argued, and I did in this morning's post
which hasn't been "packetized" at this writing so
I don't know what answers there were (if any), that
even with a decreasing MPC there could be increasing
total consumption.  That may well be.  But Keynes'
suggestion is that the MPC isn't sufficient to
generate the Investment which will keep aggregate
income at a level sufficient to provide the consumption which
will creaste full employment.  So even if consumption
is infinite we have another factor, the need for
investment, which is even "more infinite."  I consider
in my rudimentary awareness to talk about one infinity
more than another as a kind of paradox, though I suppose
we could have two progressions towards infinity whereby
one is always lagging the progression of the other
(barring some other intervening boost to C or I,
such as demand stimulus or socialized investment).

But this seems to me syntactical (or perhaps
picayunely mathematical) reasoning rather than the
substance, which is that the MPC is NOT infinite.

But then again maybe I'm wrong.  I've been wrong
before.

Greg Nowell